OS X Snow Leopard to get WiFi triangulation, more multitouch control?

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard could introduce WiFi triangulation, used to estimate geographical location, in a crossover of the technology from the iPhone to the MacBook range. The system- which is part of the CoreLocation framework in the iPhone SDK – will presumably be used to give general location information to navigation software such as Google Maps, as the first-generation iPhone did to compensate for its lack of true GPS.

Snow Leopard will also apparently extend more control over applications’ multitouch components to developers, thanks to a new set of Cocoa-based programing interfaces. These will take advantage of the multitouch-capable trackpad in the newer unibody MacBooks, and enable third-party developers to give their software the same gesture and multitouch functionality as Apple’ own apps.

While WiFi triangulation using the CoreLocation framework won’t cost Apple anything to implement, since it takes advantage of the existing hardware rather than introducing a new GPS receiver, it remains to be seen how accurate the system is. Apple does seem to be focusing more on location-based services, recently; in their January refresh of iPhoto, they added geo-tagging functionality to the software.